CoreStates Bank and Delaware Investments

A valuable part of my experience includes high-security, large-scale corporate environments. I had access to the server room, root passwords and admin privileges, databases and app servers to administer and staff reporting to me.

While at CoreStates bank in the 90s, I built a Quattro Pro spreadsheet macro, which reduced twelve pages of spaghetti code to eight lines. Then I built macros which automatically loaded flat files from the mainframe, filtered in missing data, distributed the mutual funds totals to the team for calculating investable cash, pulled together the team’s final figures and automatically delivered a summary statement to Vanguard. Our clients loved how accurate and prompt we became. Soon after I was recruited away to Delaware Investments.

At Delaware I managed the team that installed, configured, customized, documented and maintained a real-time document warehouse system for over 200 daily users. I personally trained most of the end users and performed SQL admin/optimization including indexes and stored procedures to ensure maximum speed and availability.

We implemented the “Optech” system, by Optical Image Technologies, which allowed us to reduce massive piles of paper looming over desks and stuffed into closets. Instead, we intercepted print jobs, captured report headings and data using hexadecimal addresses, databased the terms as meta data for the document warehouse, and customized a front end.

We were a huge hit and I was introduced to the board of directors and interviewed in PC trade journals. Before I arrived to manage the project, they paid contractors to store boxes of paper deep underground in a repurposed mine-shaft. Based on our success, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changed their federal laws to allow our official financial records to be stored as self-extracting CDs rather than as paper. We saved countless numbers of trees.